KELLY O'GRADY:
00:03:52
Yeah, I think that's important context. I do want to ask you, Admiral, there's been some back and forth recently over how the troops in the region are being fed right now. Without opining on any of that specifically, how does that actually work from a logistics perspective, getting food over there and whatnot? Yeah, Kelly, first, full disclosure, I have had years of experience eating meals on ships, so I'll try to keep it as short as I can. The Navy and what their what I'll call culinary specialists, formerly mess attendants and the Supply Corps officers that are responsible for getting food that is as good as possible on ships all over the world, do a great job. I can't say enough for all the efforts I've seen by them for so many years in my Navy career. Having said that, there are challenges with especially things like fresh produce and fresh food products, and it tends to be balanced on two factors. In particular, one, how close you are to a logistics hub ashore and having a fleet-replenishment ship available to pick up some fresh food and bring it out to the ship pretty quickly. And then the second is the availability to get ship stores at a port visit. If you have a long underway period-- this is called [INAUDIBLE], for example, which some of us have done. It's very difficult to get the kind of stores you need and fresh food products as much as possible. A final comment. You always have enough food on a Navy ship, in my experience. It may be canned or frozen and not fresh. There's always enough calories out there. And just one really final comment. Sailors like me and the rest of us always have an inherent right to complain about food, and it's something that happens to all the military services, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, and so on. And that's just an inherent right that we have in the military. I, for one, will say on the record that when I was an Army cadet, I loved my MREs. But, Admiral, let me ask you a question before I let you go. The last time you and I spoke, we were talking in the wake of John Phelan, who was the secretary of the Navy, who had just been ousted. And it's interesting because one of the things that he was trying to do-- and this is a man who was a big-time supporter of President Trump, a big donor to his re-election campaign. And what he was trying to do is appease President Trump's desire to build a new fleet of battleships, a golden class of battleships. And I guess looking at the hard numbers and looking at what was possible in a country where we don't build a lot of ships anymore, he realized that he was not going to be able to deliver in the time frame that the president wanted. And what I thought was fascinating is President Trump's fascination with battleships, which comes from his childhood love of this old newsreel that we all watched, even I did as a kid, called Victory at Sea. And I didn't realize until I started digging into this that the last battleship that we had in the United States Navy, the USS Missouri,was built in the '40s or something. And so I was trying to understand why the president of the United States, in the way that we think about modern navies, would want battleships. Is that even something that is feasible and necessary in the environment that we're in today? Yeah, Vlad, a great point. I would just start by saying that maritime warfare has changed dramatically since the era of battleships. I mean, they were obviously hugely important during World War II, although at that time, there was a major inflection point where aircraft carriers, because of their long-range strike capability, really was pivotal. I can't speak to why there was an obsession with battleships. I mean, maritime battles are very different and the strike capabilities that we have. All kinds of Navy ships to include less expensive, more expendable platforms, in addition to the more traditional ones. Our big shifts that we're seeing today, we need to look to the future. And I'm confident that the ships that we do build-- for which there is a long lead time in any class of ships-- are going to be ones that are looking to the future and having the most deterrent effect that we can have against near-peer competitors like China and other countries, and they're not going to be battleships.
